I am Sophie, a Swedish woman by birth but English by adoption. I have a little mud hotel in the beautiful and ancient West African town of Djenne, Mali. WWW.HOTELDJENNEDJENNO.COM Because of unstable political
situation, tourism has ground to a halt. Hotel still open! But hotel staff mainly working in Bogolan studio now: www.malimali.org check out our fab online shop!

Sunday, July 13, 2014

6000 rusty health hazards littering the Djenné countryside

This is not all. In April this year there
was an official UNESCO visit to Djenné in order to prepare a report relating to
the town’s world heritage status. Two experts, one Malian and one from Benin,
walked around the Djenne Djeno site. They did not comment on the extensive and
dangerous debris. When it was pointed out to them, they said: 'yes, we are
aware of this. We financed this project and it did not work because of bad
weather conditions that year’. ( ‘We’ refers to UNESCO’s ‘Centre du Patrimoine Mondiale’). When asked to elaborate on this, they refused
to discuss it and to disclose what figure of support they were talking about.
Are we therefore talking about a ‘double whammy’ financing for these 3000 trees
that never grew on the Djenne Djeno site? More investigation is clearly needed here...